Wednesday, February 5, 2014

I saw this on Pinterest tonight and boy did it ever strike a chord with me.

"So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookshelf on the wall."

Kids, I'm sure, are pleading for this very thing to happen whether they know it or not! Why? Because not as much is learned from the TV that you can learn from a book. AND not as much quality family time occurs with the TV than it does from a book. In fact not as much quality family times occurs at all when the TV has control of a household. I was the victim of the TV set being thrown away when I was a kid. Actually ours went down into the basement - the scary dark, unfinished basement where every boogie-man imaginable lived" You wanted to watch TV? You went down there to watch it. Do you think we did? Heck, NO!I remember that fateful night. My older sisters were "glued" to the TV and clearly not listening to my mother. She finally got fed up and insisted to my father that the "thing" was going downstairs! So dad carried it down to the basement. Did he put it down at the bottom of the stairs? NO! It went in the farthest, backest, darkest corner of the basement! NEVER were we to ever have a TV in that living room ever again. It's over 40 years later now, and I can honestly attest that there is NO TV in that living room STILL!

As a kid growing up I thought it was just awful that we didn't have a TV to watch. Friends would come over and wonder where it was. If some special event, like the Olympics, or Roots, or the Holocaust was on, we would bring our little 9 inch black and white TV upstairs and watch it. Then it'd have to go downstairs immediately when it was over.

But as an adult? This just shows me how SMART my mother is! She made sure we had a house with no TV! She made sure we spent time with one another, and that we read, and played board games, and cooked, and gardened. We did everything together except watch TV!

There are times that, I have to admit, that I have cut off the cable for my own kids cause TV watching was getting out of hand. Life is SO different when you don't have TV controlling your household. So much more gets done. So much more learning, and reading, and crafting, and home cooking, and everything else gets done - TOGETHER!

So ... is the TV controlling your family? Turn it OFF! Get rid of the cable! Put it in the basement or the garage. Don't know what to do with your kids then? Read them a good book.